


In Spaces Between

by Likerealpeopledo



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: Gen, I think we all know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-03
Updated: 2014-12-03
Packaged: 2018-02-28 01:25:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2713838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Likerealpeopledo/pseuds/Likerealpeopledo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even if she knows the exits, she doesn't have to take them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Spaces Between

**Author's Note:**

> Starts off on Danny's POV in the last few minutes of DOAMIW and meanders from there

I:

**Between his exit and knocking on the door** :

Danny stands in the hallway outside of Mindy’s apartment, his hand still braced on the cool metal of the doorknob. His limbs twinge with the hot pinpricks of his own anxiety that currently refuse to allow his blood to flow normally. Something about his fight or flight response seems off; it could possibly be stuck on intermittent. He scolds himself with the physiology; _Norepinephrine, you have ONE job_.

The science can never really fix him. He used to think that if he became a doctor that he could learn how to put things back together; maybe he could learn how to mend what was fractured with something simple like plaster, and time. But it isn’t ever that easy. His life hasn’t ever proven to be simple. And Mindy isn’t plaster. He’s never been able to discover the precise formula that causes her to dovetail smoothly into his interlocking pieces, and he can’t decide if that gives him consternation or relief.  It's an odd mixture, and as a result, he chooses to take the path of least resistance time and time again.

He'd spent more than a few years sharing a bed with his mom and his little brother, because that way, if someone tried to sneak out, maybe he could stop them. That wasn’t ever the reason he admitted to, but there was a certain safety in numbers; in the three Castellanos cocooned in his Mom’s double bed, tucked up into each other like tiny Russian nesting dolls.

Maybe the same rules could apply here: stay in her bed, sleep closest to the door, and ensure no one sneaks out. Repeat for the next forty years. Even after all these years, he still hasn’t figured out a viable plan for when someone else sneaks in.

Even the days that forever seems truly possible;  they don’t always outnumber the ones where he can’t fathom how he emerges from Wednesday unscathed, let alone another year, or twenty. He feels like he is always trying to keep from getting caught, but he has no idea what crime he’s actually committing. He’s constantly checking his pockets to make sure that he’s not accidentally carrying low grade nuclear weapons. Metal detectors give him cold sweats.

_If you walk away right now, you’re walking away forever and she has no idea that you’re even thinking of going. It was a diary entry, not an ultimatum._

_You are ruining this._

_You can’t outrun your feelings for her._

_Daniel Alan Castellano. It’s just a name. It is not a life sentence._

_Nothing here is beyond repair. She loves you and she has never hurt you. But you’ve hurt her, and if you get on that elevator, you will do it over and over again._

_A real man doesn’t leave._

_This is fight._

_Fight._

Danny raises his fist to knock on the door.

* * *

 

 

II:

**Between Wednesday and Friday:**

He makes her hand rolled gnocchi and made from scratch pistachio gelato and she’s pretty sure that he’s trying to fatten her up to stuff her into an oven, but it turns out it’s just because it’s Thursday. The smell of roasting garlic and porcini mushrooms fills Mindy’s apartment, and she suspects that same scent will linger in her apartment for days, wafting each time she swings open her front door. Not that she minds.

They’ve been apart for three days; Danny doing every surgery known to vagina-kind, and Mindy holed up doing research for an article on labial rejuvenation techniques that she and Peter, an inexplicable combination of poor grammarians, have been tasked to write by an over-eager, publication hungry Jeremy.

Danny is in a good mood; he brushes her fingers and looks at her lips as she talks, and he laughs at all her jokes, even the off-color ones. He tells her that he missed her, and that he thought about her while he was removing Tracy Lincoln’s left ovary. She doesn’t want to know what about that ovary reminded him of her, but he says it with a jaunty tilt of his eyebrow and the little lines around his mouth dance; and she imagines that the ovary was delicate and precious, just like her.

When she brings up Peter, and their article, he gets a tight little smile, one that makes her think that he could be jealous, or maybe more accurately, hostile. Maybe he’s thinking of the ovary again. But it passes, whatever that coarse little smile was, and he’s back to being winningly flummoxed about one of her life choices immediately following. His eyes crinkle and sparkle with a joke that is just theirs and she dismisses any idea that he might not be entirely and wholly happy. 

She's been looking for them lately, the context clues, just so she can know how much she needs to protect herself, just in case.  He's been off lately, just here and there, jittery and strange at times that don't call for it. 

 

He washes the dishes, which is not part of their previous deal, because he cooks, and she is usually the one who cleans. She hops up on the counter next to him as he scrubs his favorite sauté pan, with steel wool and some special soap that he has imported from Iceland, or some country that gives three craps about sauté pan cleanliness. Mindy watches as the longish hairs over his ear curl with the steam from the sink. He’s beautiful; she loves his profile, the straight lines of his nose and how his jaw is cut so squarely, so succinctly, no waste. He never looks his age from the side; he looks younger and softer, no matter how close to or on top of forty he becomes. She stares at him like he’s a photograph that she’s had taped down in an album; she’s seen the picture so many times but she keeps finding something new to focus on each time she flips to his page.

He turns off the sink, definitively, with a _ca- thunk_ of the faucet spigot, and wheedles his way between her legs, balancing on the counter, his hands flanking her hips. He leans his forehead close to hers, but not quite flush, and she rubs her fingers across his stubble, scratchy and wonderful and innately Danny. He tells her he missed her, again, and his lips are too close and too perfectly formed not to kiss. Immediately. She silently thanks Amber Delabruzzo (his high school girlfriend of six glorious months, to hear him tell it) for teaching him how to do that thing with his tongue, and she whispers, yes, into his ear as his warm finger tips work their way under her skirt.

 

* * *

 

III.

**A rock and a hard place**

Even as an adult, Danny still has nightmares about being on stage at a dance recital and not having gone to a single rehearsal, or knowing a single beat of choreography.  The lights are on, the music swells, and he's frozen.  People gape, point, stare.  It happens more and more now, and sometimes, when he wakes up from it, Mindy will rub spirally patterns on his back until he goes back to sleep, like his Mom used to when he was a kid. 

He wakes from the latest and Mindy isn't lying next to him, her pillow missing from her side of the bed.  That's happened more than once in the past little while, and it never doesn't give him pause.

He finds her on the sofa, watching television on mute, curled under one of his blankets.  When she spots him, she turns off the television set and something about the resolute way she tosses the remote aside causes his gut to clench.  "Danny, I think we need to talk about the other day after...."

Danny nods, even though he would rather talk about yogurt. Or reality television. Or gourmet coffee. Or space aliens taking over the United States and enslaving the human race to only discuss yogurt, reality television, and gourmet coffee.  Anything but that.

“Danny, I know you were absent the day they taught human interaction, but this is getting ridiculous.  I don't know if I can wait for you anymore.” She crosses into the kitchen, refusing to meet his eyes.  Mindy's face is tight, tighter than it should be; he’s making her brittle again, that thing he does to people when he loves them but can’t seem to love them _right_. Danny’s body vibrates with what he fully believes, without reservation, is his complete inability to have a healthy relationship.   He wants to unzip his own skin and step outside; just for a few minutes, just for a sense of relief. _How do people do this?_

He’s still not up to speed. He could run for miles and never catch up to where she is. He doesn’t know the route. 

Being in love isn’t ever a choice, but everything that comes after it is, and Danny knows he’s terrible at choices. His way had been easier: _Everything has its place._ No choices required.

"Wait for me for what?"  He plays dumb, to buy time.  He needs as much time as he can gather. 

She pushes herself off the sofa, moving toward the kitchen, and he notices that he is physically backing up as she approaches.  "To move in.  To move...on."

"C'mon, Mindy, you know that if I had to get married again, it would be to you."  Maybe it's a leap, from moving in to marriage; maybe he's made it unnecessarily.

When Mindy’s face doesn’t move, he knows that he’s finally done it. So much flashes behind her wide eyes that she physically steadies herself against the counter and Danny has to stop himself from grabbing her arm to keep her upright. His reflexes are attuned to hers; why can’t everything else be? “Had to?”

“You--you know what I mean.” He knows that there is no way to rephrase that sentence to make it anything less than awful; he's awful.  A monster.  

“I don’t.” Her eyes glisten at the edges, and she doesn’t appear as brittle as she does fragile. He goes to her despite his initial instinct, even though a six foot force field seems like the exact distance that he should probably have from every breathing human at this point. "I don't know what you mean anymore, Danny."  

He knows that he has reasons; valid, useful, completely justifiable reasons that he could effectively destroy seven months of dating and seven years of friendship in fourteen words or less. “I just…it’s not like I knew that my marriage was ending, before it ended. I didn’t know that the last night I spent in bed with her would be the last night…I didn’t know that my Dad was going to pick that day not to come home from the bar…I didn’t know.”

“And this has to do with me, because?” She draws out the last word.  "If that's what you want, but not what I want, what do you expect me to do now?" He knows what she is asking; what she is suggesting, and the nausea ripples through him in lapping waves. _She’s right to want to leave._ _But she can't go._

“Mindy.”

“Danny.”

"I can’t take that punch again.”

“I’m not going to punch you.” She distracts him slightly by unconsciously clenching her fist, and then he’s not so sure she wouldn’t. She should.

“You don’t know that. I don’t think, I don’t think my Dad planned to walk out on his wife and kids on a random Tuesday night. I think that it just…happened. And I don’t think Christina thought she was going to do what she did either.”

Mindy purses her lips and exhales slowly, “I’m sorry about your Dad, Danny. I am. You had a hard life. I get it. I hate it for you, because I can see who you were, really, underneath who you are, now, because of…everything.” Mindy pauses, “But Christina, she knew. She has that look in her eye. That tiger on the prowl look. No one with cheekbones like hers stays faithful. It isn’t genetically possible.”

He likes how she still gets worked up about Christina, like she wants to protect him. He likes feeling protected. It’s new and different, and nothing like his life has been.

“Maybe.” Danny shrugs. “But maybe it just happened to her without warning too, and maybe it will happen to you. Whatever it is; it seems to fall out of the sky and it bumps you on the head and it tells you, _Leave him, run, run like the wind._   You wake up one day and it’s just there, out of nowhere, and then you’re gone.  I can't have you gone."

“I don't want to be gone, Danny.  And, please note, I haven’t run yet.  Despite the fact that you have shown me some pretty frightening facets of your personality.”

He has a vague notion that he came out here to repair something, or to find comfort, and somewhere beneath this mess is a solution. The simplest, straightest lines between two points:

“I love you.”

When she doesn’t immediately throw her arms around his neck and in fact, remains completely still and stone-faced, Danny realizes that he hasn’t solved the equation correctly. “I will probably always love you. Isn’t that enough?” Now, finally, he knows it’s not enough, but if only he could just convince her that it is.

“Probably? Jesus, Danny.”  She takes his hand, and leads him back to the couch, tucking her feet beneath her.  "I've been watching you, you know, since that night you left my apartment and then came right back."

"Yeah?"

"I thought you might not be happy with me anymore."

"I am very happy with you. You make me happy."

Mindy touches him lightly on the arm, and he caps her hand with his, grateful for the contact.  "I shouldn't be the only thing that makes you happy, Danny."

"I don't need a lot of things, babe.  I just need you." 

"And I need more than weird ambivalence about spending our lives together."

He lives his life in a state of dread; the kind where he is always waiting for the other shoe to drop, because that is how it has always gone, and he has no reason to believe it will ever go another way.  That crime he's always committing, what's really weighing down his pockets; it isn't anything that anyone else has ever done to him.  It's what he does to himself.  

"I'm not that ambivalent."  His voice doesn't sound like his; it's displeasingly thick and his mouth is suddenly very dry. 

"Stop sabotaging yourself, Danny."  She shivers, and heads back to the sofa to wrap herself back in the fluffy blanket and avoid the winter air that seems to seep through his windows, despite their double-pane.

"I don't know if I can."

Mindy wraps her arms around him, pulling him on top of her, a gesture that always feels new to him, no matter how many times she does it.  His body remembers that it's 3 a.m. and he's hasn't slept soundly tonight, or many before it, and he reflexively huddles into the softness of her arms and breasts, his eyes drowsy.  She smells like chocolate chip cookies and it reminds him of the way his friends' kitchens would smell when they came in from playing _Cops and Robbers_ on the front lawn.  A place he could visit, but never really live.  "It's late, Danny.  You have a procedure in the morning."  She pulls on his hair, prodding him to leave his fleecy nest.  

"But we didn't resolve anything."  He twists his head back, searching for her eyes.  Maybe then he'll have a resolution.

She lifts a corner of her mouth, and her eyes reveal that he's not the only person expected to be brave in this situation.  "Nobody left.  I'd say that's a step." 

Mindy pulls on his arm, dragging him toward the bedroom, her pillow under her arm.  He follows behind her obediently, because he knows that he has to choose eventually.  He can't make her stay if he can't make himself believe she'll stay. 

Even if she knows the exits, she doesn't have to take them. 

 

 

 


End file.
